Chapter 5
Vivian Montavez’s flop was a four-story walk up in the shadow of one of Queen Anne Hill’s large, digital television towers. It was a worn, old 1920s building, but looked well maintained. It didn’t add up as the usual Genie flop, but I reserved judgment. Constantine parked the black Charger in the two-minute loading zone.
He climbed out of the car and pulled a large, black handgun from a holster under his jacket.
“Isn’t any need for that,” I said. “You’ll freak out the locals.”
Constantine ignored me, stepping up to the front doors of the building. They were unlocked, or rather the lock was broken. Constantine pulled one door open and stepped inside, keeping the automatic by his thigh.
I waddled on behind, fishing another Kools out of my pack.
Climbing four stories, Vivian’s apartment was the one with the view of town. The hallways smelled of mildew and cooking food, and the muted sound of live music came from the lower floors. Constantine climbed the stairs with purpose, peering through the doorway at each landing, securing his six.
I stumbled on, lighting my smoke and taking a long drag. At floor four, we walked the full length of the corridor and came to the door of 4C. Constantine shuffled to the right of the door and raised his pistol to eye level, readying for the assault.
“On three,” he said as I stood, uncomfortably. It worried me, what might happen if that big gun of his went off. “One, two, three!” he counted off and sprang forward, covering the door. But I did nothing. There was a potted plant by the door. Some sort of rubber plant. As I got closer, I realized it was plastic. It figured. There wasn’t enough light in the hallway for anything to grow. Still, it was pretty bushy and I stuck a hand into its soil. It took me only two seconds to come up with a key.
I held it up and showed both sides to Constantine. I put it in the latch and opened the deadbolt.
Constantine pushed past, sweeping the small, one-bedroom apartment. He called “Clear!” from the bathroom, bedroom and kitchen. I reached for my belt, drew my .357 Rhino, and sauntered in.
Constantine’s SWAT antics might have been silly, but he was right about one thing: I’d been through enough strange doors in my time to know it was best to do so with a gun in your hand.
A self-portrait welcomed me to Vivian Montavez’s apartment, hanging in the small, rectangular hall. The portrait was of a laughing, gorgeous dark-haired woman, showing off a mouth of perfect teeth.
I was just able to recognize the subject in the painting as the dead girl I’d last seen on a slab in the Morgue. She was hauntingly beautiful, with large, black pearls for eyes that instantly consumed you.
If Vivian had painted the self-portrait, she was a pretty good artist. I mean, I didn’t know a damn thing about art, but it was pretty nice. Sorta of a weird greeting to have in your own apartment, maybe. A little narcissistic. But hell, I sure liked looking at it.
Left there was door to a small kitchen. Old, maybe as old as the building, but it looked clean and lived in. A percolator was on the stove and a basket of fruit hung over a small breakfast table. Right was a bathroom, the smell of lavender distinctly in the air. I stepped past the portrait, though a bead curtain and joined Constantine in the living room. There was one more door that must have been to a bedroom.
The view from the window was pretty spectacular. The Space Needle stood directly before us, with the skyline of downtown beyond.
It was certainly no Genie flop.
It was warm, the radiator under one window still pumping out heat. A small flat screen stood in one corner, before a futon and a rickety looking chair. It wasn’t fancy, maybe a little dirty, but it wasn’t anything like the thousand Genie flops I’d seen in my days.
This wasn’t the apartment of someone who didn’t give a shit. It was...homey. At least, I felt instantly at home. As if I’d been in the room before.
There was well-used ashtray on the coffee table before the futon. I put out my cigarette as Constantine holstered his gun.
“This is it?” he said, somehow dissatisfied.
“This is it,” I said. What did he want?
“We’ll get the Forensics guys in,” he said, pointing at the ashtray. “So, maybe you don’t want to contaminate the crime scene too much.”
Crime scene? “It’s just the girl’s apartment,” I said. “There’s no reason to believe she was killed here.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Constantine dismissed. “We’ll still have Forensics give it a sweep.” He looked around, hands on hips, examining the small, cozy living room. The art on the walls was eclectic, like it’d been built up from thrift store shelves. There were a few nick-nacks and a whole wall of books. I could tell by watching Constantine’s stance, he had no idea what he was doing.
I just wandered around, getting a feel for the place.
I don’t know if it’s how most cops do it, but I always tried to get in the head of my victim first. Accepted wisdom probably considered murder cases about the perpetrator – method, motive, opportunity and all that – but I never subscribed to that theory. Nine times out of ten, I’d always found, people get themselves killed for some reason. Murderers hardly ever hang out, hiding in bushes to leap out at random victims. More often than not, the corpse did something that caused their life to collide with that of the murderer: pissed off the wrong asshole at the wrong time, humped the wrong guy’s woman, or snorted the wrong dope. Facts about the victim were always a hell of a lot easier to uncover, too. Chiefly because they were conveniently dead and couldn’t interfere with the investigation.
And if you could figure out what the victim did, what positive action they took that inextricably sent them down the path to oblivion, you were a whole shit-can closer to figuring out who killed them.
Sometimes that small detail came along almost as an after though.
What had Vivian Montavez been into that’d gotten her beaten and thrown into a dumpster?
It just didn’t add up.
Nice girl. Rich, powerful family. Artsy, beatnik apartment. Kitchen full of food, bathroom full of perfume. No, Vivian was no Genie. But according to the labs from the corpse, she’d tested positive to the genetic markers of Geneing. Her DNA was altered. Was she that weird border case of people who could actually handle the dope? Use the triggers to successfully turn it off? No, they didn’t exist. All my time on the force, and I’d never met one. Sure, you’d find a husband and father who said he could turn it on and off when he wanted to, but dig a little deeper and you’d always find a rotten core. A life about to implode on itself. But I didn’t smell anything rotten about Vivian’s apartment. Just that slight scent of lavender from the bathroom.
Then I saw it on a side table. It took all my physically effort not to react for it and tipoff Constantine.
“Perhaps the Senator will want her personal effects,” Constantine said across the room, he’d picked up a tchotchke off a table. “At least, we can give him that.”
“You should get the number off the land line,” I said, thinking quickly. I was making it up on the spot, but it was not a half-bad idea. “Run her calls. We should do a full canvas of anyone she’d had contact with.”
Constantine turned to the classic handset hanging in the kitchen. He picked up the phone and looked at the number scrawled on the receiver. His momentary distraction was all I needed. I reached for the side table, scooped up the e-reader and slid it into the pocket of my bomber.
Constantine read aloud the phone number. I wrote it down on my notepad, tore out the page and handed it to him.
“We’ll see what this turns up,” Constantine said, looking at the slip of paper. “And what Forensics finds—” His phone interrupted him, ringing deep with his suit. At least, I thought his phone was lost somewhere in the pocket of his suit. He didn’t reach for it, he simply tapped behind his ear. I didn’t see any device.
He nodded and muttered in his own private conversation. “No, they have to file the com
plaint with the Circuit Judge on Tuesday...” he said to the air. “No, Tuesday. I know. I know Monday is a federal holiday. Why do you think we chose this weekend?” Constantine turned for the door, still talking on his phantom phone. “Well, then they’re shit out of luck, aren’t they? No, no, I’m done here, I’ll be back at Command in fifteen minutes. Can you wait here until Forensics arrives? Fonseca? Detective?”
It slowly dawned on me that he was talking to me again. “Oh, what? Sure?” I stammered.
That was enough for Constantine. He turned and stepped out in the hall, continuing to berate the other end of his phone call. He was leaving me high and dry on the top of Queen Anne Hill, but I didn’t mind. Frankly, I was glad to see the back of him.
I waited a full two minutes before I removed the e-reader from my pocket.
I sat down in the rickety chair, pulled Vivian’s ashtray closer across the coffee table, and lit another smoke. I took a puff off the cigarette and relaxed into the chair.
I felt oddly at home, surrounded by the dead girl’s things. Perhaps my “getting into the victim’s head” shtick was working too well, but I couldn’t remember ever feeling so comfortable in a strange place.
Perhaps that was why the e-reader had stood so sharply out of focus against the backdrop of the apartment. It just didn’t fit. The wall of books, the thrift store art, the nick-nacks, all screamed of a woman interested in the tactile sensation of things. I’d never met Montavez other than touching her mutilated corpse just long enough to drag her out of a dumpster, but somehow I knew she wasn’t the kind who read books on a tablet. The bookcase was so neatly organized, and its contents so obviously a work of love that the e-reader had to belong to someone else.
Perhaps the murderer? It was quite a leap of faith, but the e-reader in the apartment couldn’t just be a coincidence. I smoked my Kools and flipped it on, hoping for pay dirt.
If I could solve the Montavez murder myself, recover her body, that would be quiet the slap in Constantine’s face and his three C’s. It was the kind of thing that might save a guy his civil service paycheck...
But the e-reader contained only one book. Its title made me cough.
Q. Just Q. My finger hesitated on the select button.
Could there be anything good inside this document? Anything I really wanted to learn?
I told myself not to be such a pussy and then hit select.
My disappointment was audible.
The document opened to show a screen full of scrambled text. Page after page of random characters and punctuations marks. It was encrypted. Fuck. I switched off the e-reader and returned it to the pocket of my bomber.
It’d been a long shot, anyway. Now I was well and truly up shit’s creek without a paddle.
I smoked my cigarette and mused, looking at the view from the window.
I knew a guy at the university who might be able to decrypt the file. He had the computing power and the fan-boy interest in police work to put in the hours to help out a cop. But did it really matter? I thought, looking at the skyline of Seattle. If Seattle was now officially a Federal wardship, was any of this really my problem?
Maybe. I looked around at the apartment, at the comfortable but simple decorations and the small, kitchen table set for two. Maybe, for the first time in my life, I should care about something more than my next paycheck.
After all, people like Vivian Montavez deserved better.
That Nietzsche Thing Page 5
